Home is where the traveler’s heart is

Does homemaking abroad really deserve its own literary genre? Clearly the reading public thinks so, as evidenced by brisk sales of Peter Mayle (who has made a career of writing about his French residency since 1990’s “A Year in Provence”) and Frances Mayes (who gave her home in Italy similar treatment in 1996’s “Under the Tuscan Sun” and sequels).

Maybe, given the success of those two and many others in their wake, it was inevitable that anthologies would follow.

Sure enough, the writers in this book tell of new, renovated and borrowed homes in foreign lands, of quirky contractors, eccentric neighbors and the magic of looking up one day in a previously strange place and realizing: I’m home now.

But instead of piling on quaintness and condescension -- traits I fear most in this home-away-from-home genre -- “A House Somewhere” mostly takes a broader view and goes more places than one author could take you.

In many travel books, authors spin relatively meager experience into overlong narrative.

Here we have the opposite: Editors George and Sattin have selected passages that compress rich, sustained experiences -- some pleasant, some startling, some harrowing -- into few words.

Some of those words are choice indeed, such as William Dalrymple’s account of the morning his landlord in New Delhi cut off his water supply. The author had hosted guests the previous evening.

“Last night I counted seven flushes,” Dalrymple’s Mrs. Puri announces. “So I have cut off the water as protest.”

And then, he writes, “she paused to let the enormity of our crime sink in.”

My favorite pieces were Vida Adamoli’s touching and comic account of local characters in an Italian beach town she calls Torre Saracena, and Karl Taro Greenfeld’s fond, dry-witted reminiscence of his Paris student days in an enormous loft shared with a promiscuous kleptomaniac, an inexpert painter of vast canvases depicting crucial moments in St. Louis Cardinals baseball history, and a Nerf basketball.

The book gives us 26 writers and a bracing geographical range. Lily Brett’s troubling tenure in New York City yields to Jeffrey Tayler’s atmospheric (but also dismaying) stay in Marrakech, which yields to Tony Cohan’s deft and hilarious account of a tightly wound gringo’s slide into heedlessness during Mexican Independence Day festivities in San Miguel de Allende.

There are flaws.

Many readers intrigued by this topic will have already digested the passages from Mayle and Mayes, and perhaps contributions from Cohan and Paul Theroux (from 1985’s “Sunrise With Seamonsters”) as well.

Also, because 18 of the 26 stories are excerpts from previously published texts, a reader has the sense of joining a conversation in progress; there are many unexplained references and characters on the periphery.

Don’t count on the most compelling stories coming from the most famous names.

The contributions from Isabel Allende and Jan Morris, for instance, are fairly slight. The best finds here are from some of the least familiar names.

In South America, nature, si; night life, no

Once upon a time, the words “Time Out” on a cover meant you were going to read about night life, probably in London (where this guidebook publisher is based) or New York. But the staff has been diversifying, and this slim first edition on the stark, gorgeous and mostly empty southern tip of South America is certainly evidence of that.

The book covers the Chilean and Argentine sides of the region, including many color photographs and maps and a fair dose of historical context. Compiled with extensive local input, it emphasizes natural wonders, from beaches to glaciers, with particular attention paid to guest estancias, old ranches that have been converted to lodgings.

The guide has ads, which always annoy me in a book, but it also contains the pledge that neither they nor any payment has influenced any review.

The beauty that lurks behind urban blight

Much of the world has heard of Frank Gehry’s great silvery Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and how that building’s appeal is helping transform a formerly forlorn industrial city in northern Spain. A similar story is unfurling in North Adams, Mass., a formerly forlorn mill town (and later factory town) in the Berkshires, a few miles from the Ivy Leaguers of Williams College and Williamstown.

Since the early 1990s, North Adams’ idle old mill (and later factory) has been under transformation. It reopened in 1999 as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCa). This book isn’t the story of the mill conversion (MassMoCa has told that story in another book) but of the property across the street. There, a pair of entrepreneurs have converted five old workers’ row houses into an unexpected hotel. The Porches Inn opened on River Street in 2001, and it stands as a symbol of the ripple effect that the leaders of North Adams are hoping for.

As the images show, North Adams remains an unfinished renewal project, and this book may or may not lure you there. But it might remind you, architecturally or otherwise, of the possibilities hiding behind what looks like blight.

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Calendar writer Christopher Reynolds’ book column appears twice monthly.